STORY ARCHIVE

Meet Dr Melanie Fitzpatrick

Dr Melanie Fitzpatrick has always had an interest in science but was never going to be a ‘white lab coat wearer’. Over the last 15 years Melanie has spent most of her summers in Antarctica, drilling into the ice core to study the impact of global warming. Antarctica is a climate change hot-spot and over the last year or so Melanie has seen some dramatic changes. Travel to into Melanie’s polar world to understand why she is so committed to securing a habitable planet for future generations.

TRANSCRIPT

Dr Melanie Fitzpatrick: I've never really been one for standing in front of a computer, or sitting in a lab.

I've always loved being outside. It's where I actually feel connected to the earth and I feel like I'm myself. I love to kayak, I love to climb, I love to walk, I love to be out, and it's really important in my, in my own spiritual philosophy that I come and reconnect with these places.

My parents influenced me amazingly in my life. They provided me with an education that has allowed me to do what I'm doing. They gave me the freedom to actually think and be myself. We lived overseas when I was a child and I think that opened my world view as well and I think I grew up thinking I could do anything.

I saw an ad in the paper saying they needed a glaciologist to go to Antarctica. I applied for the job and got it and spent the next, well fifteen years of my life really going between Australia and Antarctica.

My first trip to Antarctica was extraordinary. It’s an incredible place it's almost indescribable with words, the immensity of it, the size of it. I think you need to be able to cope not just with being one of a few women in a very male dominated area, but also you need to be able to cope with being in an isolated area.

One of my coping strategies is to write a journal: Ice it's a simple word, but here in this polar desert ice defines everything. It is everywhere, it sculpts the landscape. It is the landscape.

You spend a lot of time just surviving, staying warm. The work can be really challenging. I was working with a coring team and we were drilling an ice core through the thickness of the Antarctic ice sheet. It can be up to four kilometres thick in places, we retrieved an ice core, which is basically an archive of past climate information. Our ice core was over a kilometre thick. So you can imagine how long that took, it took several seasons to actually drill that ice core. The ice itself it traps bubbles in from the atmosphere and it tells us what was in the atmosphere ten, twenty, thirty thousand years ago.

We've seen over the last century more than point six of a degree warming which is an extraordinary rate of warming. It’s ten times the normal rate. We're going to see more intense and frequent storms, cyclones, droughts and one of the worrying things is sea level rise and its effect on the Australian coastline. The poles are very much the places that are giving us the greatest warning about climate change.

It is difficult coming back from Antarctica. You come back to an ordinary life that's so different from what you've experienced down there. There aren't any children down there, and there aren't any old people down there. So it's really nice to come back and be around my family again.

My hope and vision for the future is that we keep this planet habitable for not just for future generations but for our children and grandchildren today. We have to act right now to ensure that we have a sustainable planet.